


Powers Served, Severed

by PrinceofHellebore (PrinceofPlants)



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Timeline, F/M, Gen, Manipulation, Mildly Dubious Consent, More tags to be added, Powerful Wilde, Tags May Change, no beta we die like men, spys
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:20:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29016486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrinceofPlants/pseuds/PrinceofHellebore
Summary: His mouth slips from hers and he kisses the corner of her lips and then along her jaw and down her neck.  He pauses and sucks a bruise into her skin, and her breath hitches. She can feel him smile against her skin.  She steals his tie pin, she’d wanted it anyway.  The search of his accessible pockets hadn’t turned out the sealed envelope that she had seen him receive earlier, the one she was sure held the information she was supposed to retrieve.Sasha Racket is groomed by Eldarion to fit into Upper London Society.  Rakevine and Barrett plan to use her as a spy.  Sasha's first mark is Oscar Wilde.
Relationships: Sasha Racket & Oscar Wilde, Sasha Racket/Oscar Wilde
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	Powers Served, Severed

**Author's Note:**

> This timeline starts pre campaign during the time before Sasha is free of the ring.

Sasha is stunned by how easy it was to get here. She dips her fingers into her mark's pockets and slips his cufflinks from his sleeves while he’s distracted kissing her. Her mark, Oscar Wilde, has one hand at her waist, she can barely feel it through the stiff layers of her bodice. His other is cupping her jaw, she can feel his fingertips just behind her ear at her hairline. His lips on hers are gentle and it’s nice even though it’s not why she is here. 

Wilde breaks the kiss for a moment, meets her eyes and she lets her gaze drop to his lips, which he takes as an invitation to kiss her again. Her heart flutters, she had her fingers in his pocket and is surprised again at how easy people are to distract. She plucks his silk pocket square from its place as she tilts her head and invites him to deepen the kiss, nips at his lip. He steps forward with a foot, crowding her against the book shelves at her back. His knee presses her skirts between her thighs as he does so. The sensation is more of a distraction than she had guarded against and she takes a breath to refocus. His mouth slips from hers and he kisses the corner of her lips and then along her jaw and down her neck. He pauses and sucks a bruise into her skin and her breath hitches. She can feel him smile against her neck. She steals his tie pin, she’d wanted it anyway. The search of his accessible pockets hadn’t turned out the sealed envelope that she had seen him receive earlier, the one she was sure held the information she was supposed to retrieve. The last likely place, if it was still on his person, was his internal breast pocket.

“You’re handsome as a fox.” He says as he moves from kissing her neck to placing one under the lace at her collar. She freezes, with her fingers under his lapel. She could ignore the physical sensation but the words hit her with the thrill she suspects the kisses should have. But ‘handsome’ isn’t what she’s supposed to be, what she’s been trained to, moulded, formed, remade into for the last nine months. She’s meant to be a lady; elegant, poised, charming, _pretty_. And she hates it with every fiber of her being. She’s sure Wilde will have noticed her tension and she covers it with a protest that holds no conviction: “Don’t you mean pretty,” she breathes. 

Wilde stops and unbends and she has to allow her fingers to fall away from his lapel and the envelope that she'd nearly taken, tucked beneath. His fingers toy with the lace he had pulled aside. “Oh, they tried to make you pretty.” He tilts his head, looking over her face and the collar of her dress. “They covered you in lace, curls…” his hand moves to brush through the long coils of hair at her neck and then finally his fingers brush across her cheek. “Rouge.” A tiny frown crosses his face, exists in his brow for a moment, “But that isn’t enough to hide you from someone who’s done the same to himself.”

His hand falls from her cheek and comes to rest on her shoulder, thumb against her throat. There’s no grip to it but she feels as pinned as if he held her. Sasha’s heart pounds and she’d swallow except she’s been trained out of that little tell. She tries a laugh to deflect. She’s been taught many laughs, many looks and gestures to make her fit into high society. This is the one that was supposed to make everyone think her foolish and dismiss her as anything other than the debutante she’s been playing. She shifts her weight too to prepare to sweep his legs from beneath him, which despite his height shouldn’t be too hard from where he’s put his feet.

As she moves there’s a pressure and tug at the straps around her thigh and then there is the sensation of a knife tip pressed into the crease of her hip, angled in a way that won’t make her bleed, unless she moves. 

“Careful, I don’t know how much anatomy you’ve been taught, but there is an artery there that if cut will bleed you out before the cleric can get here, and that’s if I call for one. If you are thinking about your chances, even if I miss the artery it’s still an injury that will stop you running very far.” He is threatening her with her own dagger that he had taken from the sheath on her thigh through the meticulously tailored slit in her skirts. She’s mortified even while impressed. 

She tilts her chin up defiantly at him. His face is as blank as when she had first locked gazes with him from across the room at the beginning of the night. 

“How did you know?”

“That you were not as you appeared? Or that there was a dagger beneath your skirts.”

“How did you see through me?”

“There were a few things. I’ll not numerate them here. Suffice it to say that like can recognize like.” His fingers drum across the triangle of muscle between her neck and shoulder. “Though the first thing was how beautifully muscled I found your shoulders, not the figure of your typical debutante.”

She drops the elocution of Upper London. “Right, good cop gov’ner. You gonna let me go or…”

“I’d like my pocket square returned and the sapphire pin. I’m fond of both. You can keep the cuff-links, they don’t carry any meaning for me. I’ll remind you of where I have your dagger pointed.” 

She tucks the silk cloth back where it was, sloppily. The pin she returns carefully so that she can admire the sapphire. Its the size of her thumbnail and is surrounded by other small gems and gold filigree. It could keep her in comfort for years in Lower London.

“Are you going to run away if I let you go.”

It’s what she’s always done when she’s been caught though that was when she was slipping in windows to knick jewelry. She doesn’t want to run now, and she has a mission to salvage. Barrett had promised that she could see Brock depending on how she performed. “No. I’ll stay.”

Wilde nods and withdraws the hand holding her knife. He takes a step away and looks at its make before turning it in his hand so that he can present her with the hilt. She takes it and decides that she trusts Wilde so she puts it back in its sheath. Wilde walks away from her, turning his back. She’s stunned by how unguarded the move is. In Lower London it would be a power play or a trap, but here it’s as if they are friends. “What do you want?” She asks.

“Satisfaction. What do you want?”

“I’m supposed to get your attention…”

He chuckles and pours a glass from a carafe on a bar cart. “You have that.”

“And an invitation to your residence, to a dinner party, or to call on you at some point.”

“Hmm.” He walks back to her and offers her a glass with a finger’s worth of whiskey in it.

She takes it.

“Is that what _you_ want?”

She shrugs. “It’ll probably get me what I want.”

He nods again and goes to lean against the desk. “I’m sure it’s pointless to ask who sent you?” She remains silent. “That’s fine, I have guesses.”

“Who are you that they are making the effort?”

“I’m just a journalist, a writer.” He picks a paperweight up from the blotter and turns it over. 

She laughs. “Right, they trained me up for a year to send after a journalist. That’s as true to what you are as my dress.”

“Truer, but I see your point.” He sets the paperweight down and takes up the pen instead. He sips from his glass, eyes on her and suddenly she feels naked before the look. Like he can see absolutely everything about her. She knocks back the whiskey and sets the glass down, and then starts to wander around the study. She hadn’t the chance to look at it before. Wilde remains where he is but tracks her movements warily. 

“I’m curious. I guess none of that was me manipulating you,” she waves at where they had been standing when kissing, and then at the floor in the vague direction of the hall and the party they had left, “was it?”

“You knew how to catch my notice. I pride myself on being able to get people where I want them, and so I let you lead while I followed. It’s a complex dance, you were taught well but it’s not something you can learn in a year.”

“It’s not in my nature anyway. I’m more rooftops and alleys than dances and trysts.”

The pen twirls in his hands. “Lower London. Rakevine. Sasha Racket.” She spins to look at him. His face was blank again. It was not the name she was using in her appearances in Upper London. She didn’t think the older woman that was her season patron, nor the host knew her by any other name than Sarah Wilson. “Pleasure to meet you.” His smile looks almost genuine but there is something calculating underneath it and she knows she's meant to see it.

She curses under her breath. “They underestimated you mate. I knew I was in over my head but Barrett’s over his.” She shakes her head laughing and flops onto the settee, puts her feet up not caring about the arrangement of her skirts. She worries at the ring on her finger. She can turn it but not slide it off.

“They were meant to." Wilde slips the pen into his breast pocket, beside the envelope. "I think our time for this little encounter is up. You can expect an invitation within a week or two, though it may be more appropriate if we meet more publicly at another party before I extend one. My parties are of a more intimate setting.”

“Why are you helping me?”

“We are both wild things caught and harnessed while we were too weak to stop it. I can help you free if you want that but it means playing along first.”

“Yes, I want that.” She could always betray him later. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much. Would love to hear what you think.  
> Love,  
> Prince of Hellebore


End file.
